Nadeau-Dubois wants to haul Quebec politics out of its corrupt rut

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‘This political class has betrayed Quebec’

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois announces his candidacy with Quebec soilidaire for the upcoming provincial byelection in the Montreal riding of Gouin during a news conference Thursday, March 9, 2017 in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

The warmer months of Montreal in 2012 were a sweaty cacophony of protest, outrage and broken glass known as the ‘Maple Spring’. Most evenings, thousands of students descended on city streets to demonstrate against the Liberal government’s plan to hike university tuition fees.

The movement had momentum, and those protests quickly grew from mass student kvetching to a treatise on Premier Jean Charest’s demonstrably corrupt government. Parents joined, often with their children in tow. The banging of pots and pans became the city’s unofficial soundtrack. Charest lost the following election.

The movement was led in part by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the telegenic leader of the CLASSE student union. Righteous and pithy, with a keen political eye, Nadeau-Dubois became the face of the more radical elements of the Maple Spring. He defended the movement’s excesses (broken windows, ersatz Nazi salutes directed at police) without seeming totally radical himself.

When it was all over, he wrote a memoir of the 2012 Maple Spring movement, donated the $25,000 in prize money he won for the Governor General’s Award to anti-pipeline causes, and has since stayed knee-deep in grassroots — not partisan — politics. He has a studied disdain for politics in general and politicians in particular, a trait he picked up from his activist parents and honed in the tire fires of 2012.

That disdain has remained intact even as he prepares for a political career of his own. Nadeau-Dubois recently joined Québec Solidaire, which began life as a compendium of leftist splinter parties and has since become the refuge of choice for environmentalists, social activists and former Parti Québécois voters disheartened by that party’s tilt to the economic and populist right.

“I’m joining a political party because we must absolutely and quickly remove the political class that has governed us for 30 years. This political class has betrayed Quebec,” he declared during his inaugural speech recently.

The decades-long obsession over the so-called ‘national question’ has turned Quebec politics into a zero-sum game, in which Quebec’s future in Canada is bandied about in the abstract, like a parlour trick.

By saying so, Nadeau-Dubois essentially blurted out what has long been whispered in Quebec. The theory goes like this: Through a combination of pragmatism, political might and the weight of inertia, the Quebec Liberal party has dominated Quebec politics so thoroughly that it either destroys or co-opts its rivals.

The Parti Québécois is Exhibit 1. Once a model of exciting political resurgence, the Péquistes have become just as addicted to the trappings of power as their fellow Baby Boomers across the aisle. The decades-long obsession over the so-called ‘national question’ has turned Quebec politics into a zero-sum game, in which Quebec’s future in Canada is bandied about in the abstract, like a parlour trick. It’s less scripted than your average professional wrestling match … but only just.

Corruption, meanwhile, has known no partisan boundary. Between 2001 and 2010, the Liberals harvested over $3 million in illegal donations from engineering firms; in exchange, these firms received lucrative contracts from the government. The PQ pulled the exact same hustle, though it managed only $1.7 million during the same period. (One cannot help but wonder whether the PQ would have been more successful with that revenue stream had it stayed in power for longer.)

Quebec’s political class — part of it, anyway — reacted to Nadeau-Dubois’s bon mots much the way you’d expect. “I find that pretentious,” huffed former PQ cabinet minister Bernard Drainville, himself a bona fide member of the political class until he decamped to the land of punditry last year. His replacement, Catherine Fournier, professed herself saddened by Nadeau-Dubois’s “exclusionary discourse.”

The Liberals, meanwhile, remained largely mum on Nadeau-Dubois, if only because his entry into politics is mostly damaging the PQ. Nadeau-Dubois is a threat only if Québec Solidaire replaces the PQ as the go-to sovereignist party. (Don’t laugh: The PQ was considered an afterthought three years before it first swept to power in 1976.)

You need look no further than the 2012 Maple Spring to see the truth behind Nadeau-Dubois’s musings about Quebec’s political class. Yes, Jean Charest was pushed from office. But the PQ managed only a minority government against a historically unpopular premier.

Once in office, the PQ reverted to a noxious brand of identity politics that, in scapegoating immigrants and religious minorities, sought to assuage the fevered nightmares of the party’s Baby Boomer clientele. It failed miserably, and the Liberals waltzed back into power a year and a half later, seemingly unscathed. The Maple Spring gave way to the unfortunate status quo.

It’s only the most recent example of Quebecers rewarding something worse than mediocrity. Nadeau-Dubois is right to point out that the PQ is implicated in this Baby Boomer shell game. Hopefully he’ll be rewarded for it.

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